Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Walkowlak et al. (2001) studied the effects of PCB exposure on “psychodevelopment in early childhood.” Out of eleven tests, only three showed significant deleterious effects of PCB exposure. In arriving at this number I am using the more conservative—and appropriate-two-tailed probability levels. The authors used one-tailed probabilities and argued that eight of the comparisons reached significance.

A slightly different type of mass hysteria erupted in the early 1990s over the claim that silicone in breast implants caused connective tissue disease. Here, the agent allegedly causing the problem wasn’t one out there in the environment, but one that women had had put inside their own bodies. The history of this major medical and legal controversy is covered in detail in Marcia Angel’s excellent Science on Trial (1997), which has served as my source for much of this section.

While the dispute over breast implants causing connective tissue disease had been going on for some years previously, it really came to the general public’s attention in April 1992, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the use of silicone breast implants for both reconstructive and cosmetic surgery. The reason for the ban was that the manufacturers of the implants had not proven that they were safe. Note that the implants had been used since the early 1960s and, while no studies conclusively showed that they were safe, there was no scientific evidence to show that they were not safe, either. However, in the early 1980s a few individual women who had had implants and also suffered from various diseases, especially connective tissue disease, claimed that the implants were the cause of their diseases. They went to court and sued implant manufacturers. At the time, there was no scientific evidence one way or the other on whether silicone in implants could cause such diseases. No one had bothered to undertake the time-consuming and expensive studies needed to address this question because such a link just didn’t seem very likely on the basis of what was known about silicone, on the one hand, and connective tissue disease, on the other. In the absence of convincing evidence one way or the other, juries in these cases tended to decide in favor of the women, often awarding huge sums in damages.

It was into this legal context that the FDA’s 1992 ban fell. While the FDA may have intended the ban to be a response simply to the lack of evidence of safety, as Angell (1997) notes, women who had implants, as well as others, took the ban “as proof that the implants were extremely dangerous” (p. 20). The legal floodgates were now opened, and thousands and thousands of women filed suits against implant manufacturers. In a feeding frenzy never before seen in U.S. legal history, lawyers of dubious ethical standards essentially “farmed” breast implant cases by convincing women first, that implants were truly dangerous and, second, that they should sue. The end result was that the Dow Corning Company, the manufacturer of silicone (but not the actual implants), was forced into bankruptcy by the judgments against it. It may seem odd that a company that didn’t actually manufacture the allegedly harmful product, the implants, should be held liable. But Dow Corning had the deepest pockets around and was thus a prime target.

All the legal goings-on took place, as noted, in the absence of any real evidence that breast implants caused disease. As soon as the question was raised, epidemiological studies got underway. But such studies take years to complete and were not finished as the thousands of legal cases moved through the courts. It is clear that in this case the legal system got way ahead of the scientific evidence. By the time Angel’s (1997) book was published, it was clear from many studies (references in Angel 1997) that there was no relationship between silicone breast implants and connective tissue disease. Like the alleged association between power lines and cancer, the association between implants and disease was spurious: With hundreds of thousands of women having breast implants, some will get connective tissue disease—and some will win the lottery—just by chance. But when these coincidences are focused on by uncritical media sources and exploited by layers, a panic easily results.

The breast implant story highlights the role of scientific evidence in the American legal system. This is an important and fascinating question, especially when the issue of junk science is involved. Junk science is a term used to describe testimony that is presented by someone who claims to be a scientific expert, but who is really putting forth pseudoscientific types of arguments and claims. The legal issues involved are well beyond the scope of this book, but Huber’s (1993) Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom is an informative and enjoyable introduction.

With the exception of the breast implant case, the cases of nationwide mass hysteria discussed here revolved around exposure to low-level or trace levels of various chemicals. It is commonly believed that exposure to even tiny, trace levels of chemicals that may be truly harmful when exposure is at much higher levels is, in itself, dangerous. But this is not always the case. As seen in the cases covered here, trace exposures do not have deleterious effects. In fact, in some animal studies it has been found that exposure to trace levels of chemicals known to cause cancer at high dosages may actually have a protective effect (Abelson 1994; Davies and Monro 1995); that is, animals exposed to low levels of a known carcinogen had less damage to their DNA than did animals not exposed at all. It is through damage to the DNA that carcinogenic chemicals induce cancer. At first such a finding seems hard to understand, probably because of the pervasiveness of the belief that there is no safe level of exposure to cancer-causing substances. But everyone is familiar with another situation in which low levels of exposure have well-known beneficial effects: inoculations against bacterial and viral disease, in which low level of exposure to the pathogen stimulates the immune system to produce protective antibodies. It is clearly not the immune system that is responsible for the lower rate of DNA damage noted above. The exact mechanism(s) are not clear, but they probably involve processes by which cells repair natural damage to DNA that occurs as a matter of course.

It is clear that the great fears induced by uncritical media hype and groups with a vested interest in heightening the hysteria in the cases discussed above were unjustified. There are numerous other cases highly similar to, but somewhat less dramatic than, those described here. See Hines (1988, chap. 11), Whalen (1993), and Lieberman (1997) for descriptions of several of these. Fears are easiest to whip up over new possible dangers coming in the form of agents most people don’t understand and over which they have little control. An incident I witnessed during the Alar panic in 1989 brings this point home. Alar was a chemical used on apples that was charged with causing cancer in humans. It didn’t (Whelan 1993), but it took a year or so for the furor to die down. During the controversy I remember shopping at a small fruit stand. One customer was engaged in a very vocal discussion with another about the great dangers of Alar and how glad she was that the fruit at this market wasn’t polluted by that dangerous, unnatural, cancer-causing chemical. All the while she was puffing away on her cigarette!

Glassner (1999) has written a cogently on the “culture of fear” that leads so many Americans to fear things that should not, in fact, cause much fear at all. Not all these fears are of things paranormal or pseudoscientific, and Glassner discusses fears of illicit drugs, minorities, and juvenile crime, among others. New fears spread much faster at the start of the twenty-first century than they did years ago, for several reasons. First, the media is obsessed with the “fear of the week” and dwells on the latest scare, rarely pointing out later that the scare was unfounded. In addition, the Internet allows rumors to move vastly faster than they would have previously. But the Internet can also help put unfounded fears to rest. At least two organizations have devoted portions of their Web sites to debunking the latest fears: the American Cancer Society ( www.cancer.org) and the Centers for Disease Control ( www.cdc.gov).